More on We Are the Strange

Stood in line for an hour or so with a gaggle of cheerful, half inebriated folk in hopes of scoring a ticket for the midnight screening of M dot Strange's animated feature We Are the Strange, and was among the last few to be whisked into the Egyptian Theater as the lights were going down. I wasn't quite sure what I was in for. A lot of big words are being bandied about regarding this film, words like unprecedented and iconoclastic and benchmark. I'm still trying to sort out the experience of watching it, but one thing I can tell you is that it's unlike anything I've seen before. It uses a unique animation style the artist calls "Str8nime" - a combination of "strangeness plus 8 bit video plus anime" - combining stop motion, CG artwork, and bluescreen effects.

The scrappy director took the stage prior to the screening. "This film was made by one guy in a bedroom with nine computers," he said. "No one had a hand in my brain, except maybe the aliens." (For the record, before the screening I happened to meet a handful of other young makers who had a hand in the making of We Are the Strange, including the guy who mixed the sound and another fellow who played a major role in the editing. "No one makes a film alone" goes the old maxim, and the final credits prove that this is also the case for this one. But M's solitary filmmaker schtick makes for good copy, and to be fair is mostly accurate.)



Watching We Are the Strange is a disorienting, discombobulating experience. I had difficulty following the plot, which the film's Wikepedia page describes as a struggle between "two diametrically opposed outcasts as they fight for survival in a sinister fantasy world." When it ended I confess that I felt a little browbeaten and overstimulated. But one thing is undeniable: We Are the Strange looks like no other film and M dot Strange is like no other filmmaker. His imagination comprises a vast wilderness which only he can chart.